Flaming Lips return for hometown OKC show

[estranged4life]

Flaming Lips plan a spectacular arrival for tonight's city concert

Sept.15,2006 Daily Oklahoman
By Gene Triplett
Entertainment Editor

No one makes a big entrance better than The Flaming Lips. And barring any last-minute mechanical failures or blown fuses, their arrival tonight on the Zoo Amphitheatre stage should be nothing less than out of this world. Master psych-pop showman Wayne Coyne will have topped even himself, and the awestricken hometown fans will no doubt welcome back their loony local heroes with a wildly appreciative standing ovation.

Too bad customs officials at the U.S.-Canadian border weren't as happy to have them back, when the Oklahoma-bred lads were returning from a Sept. 3 gig in Montreal.

"I'll tell you something, getting back into the States is inevitably a lot worse than leaving the states," Coyne complained by cell phone while waiting his turn outside a customs station last week. "I gotta tell ya, in the early days when we would come up here in like 1985 and 1986, I mean, these customs guys, man, they would make us wait in there sometimes seven or eight hours."

Ah, but things have changed since those scuffling days when the young, unknown, ragtag garage band from Oklahoma City was clattering around the country, playing dates that barely paid for gasoline and a couple of candy bars. The unabashedly experimental, theatrically outrageous psychedelic rockers rose through the indie ranks on sheer nerve as much as talent, landing a major-label contract when one of them had the brass to make a blind phone call to Warner Bros. Records.

Their noisy underground weirdness evolved into lush, ambitious, neo-psychedelic weirdness, echoing the studio magic of The Beatles and The Beach Boys in their prime, and their lives shows — complete with volunteer dancers in furry animal costumes, hand-puppets, mirror balls, confetti cannons, fake blood and Coyne crowd-surfing in a giant space bubble — have become legend, increasingly outrageous and elaborate each time out, a surreal Disneyworld of the rock 'n' roll stage.

And now, touring behind the Lips' latest, most pointedly political album, "At War With the Mystics," Coyne is unveiling his most ambitious concert production gimmick to date, and he saved it for his friends back home.

"We've been calling it ‘the unveiling of the Mother Ship in the Mother Land,'" Coyne said, getting his mind off the Customs hassles. "People often ask, ‘Why don't you play Oklahoma City more often?' I try to tell people we play Oklahoma City when we're playing everyplace else. Not to make it less significant, but we just sort of use it as another stop on our tour.

"But at least this time I sort of feel like we're really making a bigger effort in some ways for Oklahoma City just because it can be the unveiling of this new phase of our Flaming Lips production. And so, in that way, I think it's going to work out perfect."

Coyne has been hard at work with bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins and other friends and family filming a science-fiction flick called "Christmas on Mars" in his own Oklahoma City back yard since the turn of the 21st century. Now, using some of the do-it-yourself know-how he's gained from that ongoing project, he has created the "UFO Light Show," a spectacle similar to one concocted by Parliament Funkadelic in the early '70s. "But our UFO light show sort of thing will be at the top of the (Zoo Amphitheatre) venue," Coyne said. "And if everything goes right, it'll sort of slowly descend down to the stage, and Michael and Steven and (drummer) Kliph (Scurlock) will get out of the bottom of it, and they'll go to their waiting instruments. And then I'll sort of magically appear out of the top of it in my space bubble and — if it all goes as planned — the UFO sort of tips, the front of it tips into the very front of the audience."

In this manner, Coyne will roll onto the upraised hands of the audience and go surfing along in his giant hamster ball. Then, as the band begins to play, the light-encrusted, circular "vehicle," 30 feet in diameter, rears back "kind of like a giant Ferris wheel, or a giant tarantula or something ... and then shoots all this new, sort of computer-driven freak-out of a light show that we are having strapped to the bottom of this thing.

"So it should be pretty fun," Coyne said. "I mean, it's about a quarter-million-dollars' worth of lights that we're putting on the bottom of this thing, so it should be pretty outrageous."

Certainly it will earn the Lips a warmer welcome than they received from those Customs guys at the border, who had no clue what these Okie rock weirdos were all about. All of a sudden it was like nothing had changed since 1985. Coyne had to ring off when the band was called in for baggage inspection, but he called back, as promised, a few minutes later.

"We made it through," he said. "I swear, I mean, you think they would be a little more cautious or sort of hide their hatred sometimes. They asked us, ‘You guys don't listen to that rap music, do ya?' Of course we lie and we say no, and they say, ‘You don't play any songs by the Dixie Chicks, do ya?' They really do. And you just have to answer them with a smile on your face. ‘Of course not, sir.' But they let us go, and our truck has made it through, as well. That's the worst of it."

It's the kind of mind-set the Lips rail against on such songs from the new album as the rowdy "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)" and "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)."

"I think we'd be fools to think that anybody in George Bush's administration, or anybody in the Taliban or Osama Bin Laden is going to be changed by what The Flaming Lips' view of the world is," Coyne said. "I think a lot of times when we're singing about these things, we're simply singing things that we are all thinking about, and whether that's ‘how did the universe get here, and does God exist and what is love,' I think it's as easy to ask those questions as it is to ask, ‘Is George Bush insane?' And, ‘How do we deal with this idea of giving people power who don't deserve it?'"

When he's reminded that a much warmer reception awaits him at the Zoo Amphitheatre, Coyne's mood brightens again.

"You should tell people that we're recording this Oklahoma City show as part of our live DVD, so they should come dressed in whatever they feel like ..." he said. "Tell them to dress up as their favorite comic book hero or whatever, and come to the show and let's make it one of the great shows of our career. ... Let's get a bunch of freaks out there and make a go of it, yeah."

And be sure to get there in time for the big entrance. It's bound to be a love-fest that will erase all memory of that Canadian border incident.

--------------------------

And to think, most people on both coasts think all there is to Oklahoma music is all country-Sorry, But the Flaming Lips & All-American Rejects prove otherwise.

Tickets were $20, talk about a bargain. The openings acts are Deerhoof, Stardeath and White Dwarfs.

[trackaghost]

This sounds like it will be an amazing show, you should have gone Brian!
They are doing all they can to make it extra special, I'm sure it's gonna be really fun. Can't wait to see the DVD.
Wayne Coyne is too cool for school.
Thanks for posting Brian!

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by trackaghost

This sounds like it will be an amazing show, you should have gone Brian!
They are doing all they can to make it extra special, I'm sure it's gonna be really fun. Can't wait to see the DVD.
Wayne Coyne is too cool for school.
Thanks for posting Brian!

I would've loved to have gone to see this show, But our current lack of $$$$ due to medical bills deemed it impossible.

Cant wait til morning to read the review, heard this show will be a complete sellout.

[trackaghost]

Of course, I totally understand. Well, it's coming out on DVD anyway.
Post the review tomorrow too, I'd love to read it.
Was this report from the local news?

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by trackaghost

Of course, I totally understand. Well, it's coming out on DVD anyway.
Post the review too, I'd love to read it.
Was this report from the local news?

the report was from the Daily Oklahoman website (Ya must have an account to access it, so I CCP'd it. The article also appearred in the Daily Oklahoman newspaper this morning), I must've forgot to post the credit.

I'll post a review as soon as I receive it.

Great to see another Oklahoma based group/artist make it big

[trackaghost]

Cool, thanks Brian!
Is that credit to J. Michelle Martin-Coyne right? Or is that for a photo on the website?
She's Wayne's wife, who is a photographer, so I was just wondering if she really wrote that report!
Pretty amazing that the tickets were just $20 too!

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by trackaghost

Cool, thanks Brian!
Is that credit to J. Michelle Martin-Coyne right? Or is that for a photo on the website?
She's Wayne's wife, who is a photographer, so I was just wondering if she really wrote that report!
Pretty amazing that the tickets were just $20 too!

I typed in the wrong credit (Damn dumb blurry small newspaper print), there's a great big colored picture right on the front page of the Entertainment Section of the Daily Oklahoman by J. Michelle Martin-Coyne

[estranged4life]

By George Lang
Entertainment Editor


The Flaming Lips transformed the way many of us had been taught to think about Oklahoma culture. When Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Dro zd transcended "local band" status and became recognized as the standard-bearers for modern psychedelic rock, it was as if the other 5.9 billion people on this planet had been let in on our secret. And we did not mind for a second that our relatively small club had far outgrown the clubhouse — seeing Coyne bouncing around in his giant hamster ball in the pages of Newsweek merely underlined what we had known all along.

I first learned of the Lips while living in California in the late-'80s, when a friend broke out his vinyl copy of "Telepathic Surgery" and played "Chrome Plated Suicide." First, I was impressed that this fever-dream noise had emerged from my home state. But I was also taken by the fact that I was learning about it from a guy who had never set foot in Oklahoma, and I was sitting on a living room floor in San Jose, Calif., hearing homegrown fearless freaks for the first time.

A little over a year later, I was living in Oklahoma again, but my next Lips exposure came during an unplanned road trip to Illinois. Having exhausted all of our "good" music on the way to Champaign-Urbana, my friend Taylor Wilken suggested we hit a local indie record store and stock up for the ride home. He bought the only cassette copy of "In a Priest Driven Ambulance," and we fried our brains on "Five Stop Mother Superior Rain," "Unconsciously Screamin' " and "Shine On Sweet Jesus" most of the way back to Oklahoma.

I met Coyne at the infamous Smashing Pumpkins/Chainsaw Kittens (The Chainsaw Kittens were also another Oklahoma based band) show at Norman's Hollywood Theatre, when the Pumpkins' equipment, borrowed from The Red Hot Chili Peppers, fritzed out the electrical system and forced Billy Corgan to whine about it in the dark. Coyne was in the back of the room, wearing a Santa Claus hat and looking every bit the genial rock star he was becoming. I finally saw them perform a few months later in Tulsa, when the band's hot sheets of noise caused my Bob Mould-damaged ears to ring like a carillon.

When 1993's "She Don't Use Jelly" became an unexpected national hit on rock radio and the Lips showed up on "Beverly Hills 90210," we all swelled with pride and begged for it not to be a fluke. Too many people with limited knowledge wrote off The Flaming Lips as a curio of the grunge explosion or, worse, as one-hit wonders. But even when 1995's "Clouds Taste Metallic" failed to deliver a "Jelly"-size hit, real fans could sense from that disc that the off-balance pinwheels were spinning wildly in Coyne's head, and this story was far from over.

First came the parking garage experiments, in which Coyne loaded car stereos with specially recorded cassettes and created his own warped symphony. Then there were the boom-box experiments. I attended the Christmas experiment at the Hollywood in 1997. I had just returned from New York, where I had casually suggested a book about the Lips to an editor at St. Martin's Press. He told me he doubted if the market was big enough. When I saw Coyne and Drozd "conducting" 80 people who were cradling boom boxes in an orchestral semi-circle, I wished the guy could have seen what I was seeing.

Two years later, Coyne's experiments paid off with "The Soft Bulletin," the lush psych-rock record that gave the world "Waitin' for a Superman" and presented the band as rock innovators on an epic scale. But The Flaming Lips' emergence as a worldwide concern was not without its growing pains. From the time the band first gained national prominence, outsiders with limited understanding of Oklahoma's culture fell victim to moldy thinking, inaccurately describing the Lips' music, image and appeal. Too often, major media outlets employing people with the talent and sense to know better published ridiculous passages about Coyne and the Lips, invoking the most outdated Oklahoma imagery.

In June 2006, when The New York Times Book Review appraised "Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips" by Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis, the Times couldn't help itself, jumping 70 years back in time for its foremost inappropriate words, writing that Coyne "usually dresses in a white suit and an open-collar shirt, looking something like a charismatic New Age guru. More than anything else, though, he and his bandmates come across as Dust Bowl Everymen with Bible Belt work ethics."

The local blog "Cutting to the Chase" took the Times to task for its elite provincialism: "Is it possible for any major metropolitan newspaper to write about The Flaming Lips without conjuring up the 70-year-old specter of the dust bowl?" And it was not just the Times. Try Googling "Flaming Lips" and "dust bowl" — the search engine nearly expels smoke and throws off sparks.

But true Flaming Lips fans know better. When we all gather later this afternoon at the Zoo Amphitheatre, it will be to see a band that both captures the strange beauty of Oklahoma life in the 21st century and transcends it. We will be waiting for a superman.

[trackaghost]

Thanks again for that!
Wow, I wish I could be there for that show.
Sounds like there's a big buzz about it there in Oklahoma.
Looking forward to reading the review now

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by trackaghost

Thanks again for that!
Wow, I wish I could be there for that show.
Sounds like there's a big buzz about it there in Oklahoma.
Looking forward to reading the review now

this show is getting more coverage than any other artist from Oklahoma since Garth Brooks last tour in both OKC (6 sold out shows at the Myriad) & Tulsa (5 sold out shows at Driller Stadium) in the mid 90's.

Not to mention, Flaming Lips have kicked opened the door for other Oklahoma City alternative rock bands. There's already talk that within the next few years the OKC rock music scene may explode worldwide. The Bricktown area is alive with great bands.

Like I said, there's more to Oklahoma music than Carrie Underwood or Toby Keith (Could someone please shut "Mr.Mulle-Mulletman" the hell up?)

[estranged4life]

Daily Oklahoman
Gene Triplett

The circular lighting truss that had been hanging motionless and dark over the stage throughout the first three band performances at the Zoo Amphitheatre Friday night finally blazed to life around 9:30 as synthesizer music began to swell through the massive sound system.

The structure burst into brilliant red-and-white life and smoke billowed from beneath it like the landing of the Mother Ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” It descended slowly to the floor, depositing musicians Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins and Kliph Scurlock from its underbelly, while fearless leader Wayne Coyne struggled into his famous “space bubble” as it was being inflated at the top of this U.F.O. contraption.

Coyne then took a precarious walk down a ramp off the top of this elaborate chandelier and rolled out onto the supporting hands of the audience for one of his famous crowd-surfing safaris in his big, clear hamster ball. Then the fans rolled him back onstage in time to shed his plastic prison and lead the band through a driving, synthesizer-sheened rendition of “Race for the Prize,” accompanied by a blizzard of confetti and big yellow balloons that were launched out over the crowd.

This was typical of a Flaming Lips live performance opening as far as flash and child-like wonder. But this Oklahoma City-bred, neo-psychedelic band that has now achieved worldwide fame, and who just played the Hollywood Bowl a few weeks ago, chose their hometown as the place to unveil their U.F.O. light show, their latest enhancement to an already wondrous, Disney-like stage extravaganza that has dazzled people around the globe.

Coyne, curly mane of hair and beard streaked in gray, decked out in a brown or gray pinstriped business suit (it’s hard to discern true colors in all that strange night light) was like the ringmaster of a weird rock ’n’ roll circus that included volunteers from the audience dressed in alien costumes on the left of the stage, Santa Claus outfits on the right, all dancing to the varied beats. The band ripped through the Prince-like, buzz-guitar-filled psychedelic-soul of “Free Radicals,” the bouncy “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1” (with Coyne working a nun hand puppet as he sang), and the powerful protest ditty “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)” as the loving, shoulder-to-shoulder masses swayed and waved in time.

The Lips were ably preceded by the quirky pop-rock stylings of two other locally-launched assemblages, Evangelicals and Stardeath & White Dwarfs (which features Coyne’s nephew Dennis Coyne on guitar and lead vocals) and the fractured, no-wave melodies of San Francisco’s Deerhoof. All the while, costumed members of the capacity audience wandered through the crowd like extras in some European avant-garde film. There was a tucan, a penguin, a guy dressed up like a silver-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss, a dude in a three-piece suit with a bear’s-head hat, people in super-hero capes, rabbit ears, and alien antennae, and one man with a big blue stuffed monkey on his back.

In all, it was a rock ’n’ roll homecoming party of special note, especially when the Lips unleashed their most life-affirming ode, “Do You Realize??,” which actually had some people crying as they sang along.

[trackaghost]

Thanks Brian. That UFO sounds awesome!
Shame they won't be able to bring it to the UK when they play here in November

[Livia]

Saw them open for Petty at ACL this past Sunday - hamster ball and everything! I love them!

[estranged4life]

Originally Posted by Livia

Saw them open for Petty at ACL this past Sunday - hamster ball and everything! I love them!

Flaming Lips & Petty shows from ACL are now available via torrent on dimeadozen.org